Organised Crime & Crime Prevention - what works? - Scandinavian ...

NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
post of Pino Arlacchi, a sociologist-turned-politician Mafia expert, placed organised crime at
the top of the 1998 UN criminological agenda, with a rapidly devised draft UN Convention
on the subject. This great political confluence has led to international pressure to harmonise
the fight against organised crime, even if people do not always have a clear understanding of
what ‘it’ is.
However, the nature of ‘organised crime’ remains deeply contested terrain, at least in
academic circles and in those countries who are more worried about loss of independence and
civil liberties than they are about subservience to organised crime. The role of intelligence
agencies - regarding which the CIA is the best documented - in covert military operations
overseas, especially in support of anti-Communist military regimes or guerrilla movements,
makes ‘State-Organised Crime’ often a more appropriate term1.
By contrast, the term ‘organised crime’ tends to focus us downwards towards the threat posed
by some (usually alien) group of low-lifes, and one can see this in the work of the journalist
Claire Sterling (1991, 1994), who appeared merely to reflect the ideological perspectives of
US enforcement agencies. However, a note of caution. To explain the bureaucratic and
ideological functions of the term ‘organised crime’ does not by itself demonstrate that the
term is inappropriate, nor does it tell us anything about whether or not there are any long-term
groups of criminals who commit serious offences or even begin to constitute the State. The
epistemological difficulties are what sort of evidence one uses to account for the structuring
of criminal behaviour; the range of criminal behaviours that come under the umbrella of any
group of criminals; how far up the political chain one reaches in one’s delineation of who
are organised criminals (in Colombia and Mexico, for example); and how valid is the
‘evidence’ upon which one relies2.
The nature of organised crime and ‘its’ markets
It must first be re-emphasised that our construction of how crimes are organised depends on
our knowledge, and what counts as ‘knowledge’ rather than ideological ‘spin’ is at some
times less problematic than at others. Take, for example, the following situation (see, further,
Levi, 1998), which was discovered by accident rather than as a result of conscious police
targeting. In the early 1990s, the team of Chinese who were gaily distributing their counterfeit
Gold Cards on a train in the South of England were very distressed when they were spotted by
an off-duty policewoman who happened to be walking past them. Had they not been
detected, they probably would have committed hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of
fraud, and only in retrospect – if at all - would the credit card companies have dealt with it as
organised crime. Even then, the police – and researchers who were dependent on the police –
might never have had the case referred to them or might never have investigated it because
they were too busy (Levi and Pithouse, forthcoming).
In North-western Europe, organised crime as a criminal economy is essentially a cross-border
crime-trade (van Duyne, 1993, 1996). Despite the impact of modern horticulture on growing
cannabis in the inclement weather of the UK, or of synthesising drugs – making importation
from outside Europe or even the UK unnecessary - some element of cross-border trade is
1In mid-1998, the trial of senior politicians from the Gonzalez government and senior Civil Guard officials into
atrocities committed as part of the ‘war’ against the Basque ETA will reveal extensive money-laundering in
support of the assassinations of those believed to be ETA supporters. This meets all of the BKA definition of
organised crime, though its adherents doubtless thought that they were doing it for the legitimate State.
2Without descending too far into post-modernism, it is obvious that what counts as evidence depends partly on
what one wishes to believe.
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